Getting It Right, Despite Ourselves?

Brahimi’s haughty and prevaricating disposition was on display on ABC’s This Week in late April when he reacted to George Stephanopoulos’s query about his appropriateness for dealing with Iraq’s Shiites. “You know, I don’t know how to answer . . . because, you know, [it] doesn’t come into my thinking that I am, I am Sunni,” responded Brahimi. “I am a U.N. man. I am definitely a Muslim, and I come from a country where, you know, there are no, there are no problems of Sunni and Shia, so I really don’t know. I don’t think the Iranians had any problems with me in Afghanistan. Nor did the Shia. . . . They didn’t have any problem with me, so I think, frankly, I think it’s silly to suggest that I may have a problem because I am Sunni, that I would favor the Sunnis against the Shiites. Why should I do that?”

Brahimi is right: In Algeria there is no Shiite problem since you can count the country’s Shiites on your hands and toes. Algeria is a thoroughly Sunni country. Brahimi knew this; Stephanopoulos did not. The Sunni consciousness is actually one of the things that rarely evaporates even among the most Westernized Sunni Arabs. Often the pan-Arabist I-don’t-go-to-the-mosque-but-I’m-a-Muslim crowd, from which Brahimi springs, are the most disdainful, since Shiites have often been more reluctant to abandon their atavistic and parochial affections and faith.

Antipathy for Shiites, be they Persian or Arab, comes with mother’s milk in the Sunni Arab world. In all probability, Brahimi is being disingenuous when he depicts himself as just a Muslim, free of the society that produced him. He should certainly be applauded for his arduous work in Afghanistan, but Afghanistan in the Arab Middle East doesn’t count. Compare the very timid Arab outrage over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan–the Algerian elite were noteworthy in praising the Soviets’ mission civilisatrice–with Arab anger over the Anglo-American invasion of Saddam’s Iraq. Advancing a Shiite-led democracy in Mesopotamia has serious repercussions for Brahimi’s friends and kith and kin; any actions on behalf of Afghanistan’s Shiite Hazara are esoteric and irrelevant west of Iran.

One could feel a lot less uneasy about Brahimi’s commitment to democracy in the Arab world–and the Bush administration’s decision to “internationalize” Iraq through him and the United Nations–if one could find anywhere his public reflection on the Algerian military regime’s brutality in crushing the Islamist rebellion after Algeria’s generals cancelled elections in 1991. The savagery of the regime probably equaled the viciousness of the most extreme Islamists. Yet neither in defense nor in reproach can you find Brahimi ruminating on democracy in his homeland–a country that, for better and worse, has been an Arab laboratory for representative and repressive government.

The haphazardness and oddness of the trio Brahimi, Blackwill, and Bremer together planning the fate of the Bush administration and the United States in Iraq is less unsettling, however, than listening to Secretary of State Colin Powell ruminate on what “full sovereignty” for Iraqis means after June 30.

On May 14, Secretary Powell suggested that the unelected interim government would have the right to ask for an American withdrawal from Iraq. According to senior officials, he made this statement before a consensus had been reached within the administration on the issue of what exactly “full sovereignty” denotes. However, the British government obviously followed Secretary Powell’s line of reasoning, which mirrors the thinking in Paris and Berlin, and logically concluded that if the Americans were granting the right of ejection to an unelected interim government, then they must also be granting to it the right of veto over American and allied military operations. In serious difficulty with his own Labour party and disinclined now to stray too far from the common European view of Iraq as a mess, Prime Minister Tony Blair moves ever closer to Paris and Berlin, which want to see June 30 as a clean break with the past.

The Bush administration will now have none of this philosophical clarity, of course. Common sense, however muddled, intervenes. The fight at Falluja certainly revealed that any serious counterinsurgency campaign in the Sunni Triangle could be checkmated by protesting Iraqi Sunnis, not to mention the indispensable Brahimi, who found the Marine Corps actions in Falluja morally unacceptable. (The Atlantic Monthly‘s Robert Kaplan has pointed out from the battlefield that Washington managed to pull a cease-fire from the jaws of victory in Falluja.) Secretary Powell and other U.S. officials are now suggesting–though not asserting–that Washington will retain control over U.S. military operations.

“The president never, never relinquishes command of American troops,” said Powell on May 26. “He can allow them to work with somebody else and they will take instructions from that somebody else and try to accommodate that somebody else, but never do you yield command authority or total sovereignty over American troops to any other sovereign.” Anticipating the United States and an interim Iraqi government occasionally being at cross-purposes, the secretary further remarked, “I don’t expect this to be a problem because we’ve been in situations like this on and off for 50 years–Korea, Germany, France, Belgium–everywhere we have troops.”

Secretary Powell understandably wants to provide wiggle room for the United States to press, cajole, and align good Iraqis against bad ones without having to state explicitly–or have a United Nations resolution declare clearly–that the United States would be subject to a de facto minority Sunni veto over U.S. military action. (It is worthwhile to remember that the senior Shiite clerics of Najaf did not find the Marines at Falluja to be engaged in unacceptable behavior. They knew, even if the New York Times and the Washington Post did not, that an anti-American Shiite-Sunni entente was not in the offing at Falluja.)

But such common sense in Iraq is a very dicey proposition for the Bush administration. It is apples and oranges to compare America’s presence in Western European countries we liberated from Nazism and protected against Soviet communism, or America’s presence in South Korea where we stave off an invasion of totalitarianism, or in Uzbekistan where we lend legitimacy and power to a local dictator, with America’s presence in post-Saddam Iraq. The modern history and culture of all concerned is completely different.

Arab Muslim lands are vastly more sensitive to the presence of Western forces (Christian or Jewish) in their midst. Even among Iraq’s Shiites, who are almost uniformly thankful that George W. Bush saved them from Saddam Hussein, nationalist and Islamic sensibility makes it enormously difficult for them to align themselves publicly with American actions. They can do so with great sincerity privately. They can do so publicly through their silence and their unwillingness to aid anti-American Iraqis (this is the tried-and-true approach of most Shiite clerics). But publicly to stand up and say–especially if these are unelected Iraqis whose authority is delegated to them by Brahimi, Blackwill, and Bremer–that they aren’t yet in favor of “full sovereignty,” that they need Americans or the NATO alliance to protect them, is to ask Iraqi Shiites to swallow huge gulps of pride. They might do it. But this is a real crapshoot.

Which may be a major reason why Grand Ayatollah Sistani has spoken vastly more about elections than about delegated sovereignty. Sovereignty not backed by elections can’t be “full.” Arab Shiites, Arab Sunnis, and Kurds won’t really know who they are, what their relationship is with each other, and what their relationship will be with foreigners until elections allow them to stand on their own feet. It is the Americans, much more than the Iraqis and especially the Iraqi Shia, who locked onto the idea of transferring sovereignty before democracy took its course. For a variety of reasons–some good, most bad–the Americans have been scared of elections in Iraq.

So we now have to cross our fingers and hope that Sistani and the clerics of Najaf will continue to hold the Shiite center even though elections still seem as far away with the United Nations involved as they did when Ambassador Bremer was calling the shots. We have to gamble that if the senior Shiite clergy decides to object to significant aspects of the appointed transitional government, they will do so in a way that allows the overall process to continue peacefully.

The amazing public statement issued in late May by the senior clerics of Najaf, collectively known as the Hawza, against the young clerical insurrectionist Moktada al-Sadr and his Lebanese supporter, the general secretary of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, ought to fill one with hope that Sistani has not yet given up on the American promise of democratic elections. If the elections are fair, they will finally give the Shiites the stake in Iraqi society that the British denied them 80 years ago. The Hawza’s statement identifies Sadr and his Sadriyyin, not the Americans, as those who first violated the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf. The Shiite clergy obviously has not lost its balance and is even willing publicly to reprimand severely one of its own.

Given Sistani’s boldness, having Brahimi and the United Nations center stage in Iraq probably won’t hurt us. Neither probably will the common sense of Colin Powell. Nor the too distant date (January 2005) for the first round of national elections. Nor the possible selection of Iyad Allawi as Iraq’s first unelected, transitional prime minister.

Allawi is a Shiite member of the Iraqi Governing Council and the former leader of the Iraqi National Accord, the CIA’s favorite exile group, which had a very clubby propensity for former Baathist military officers. Anyone who has had dealings with the Accord knows that the organization has not been blessed by Langley with influence and lots of cash because the Directorate of Operations views Allawi or his group as a bastion of democratic zeal. But if the Governing Council, with a majority of Shiite members present, actually chose him, then he unquestionably carries Sistani’s approval–as odd as it seems, since Allawi has had an awful reputation among senior Shiite clerics. As a Shiite the Sunnis could like, Allawi may be acceptable to Brahimi.

If Sistani is in fact behind Allawi, then Brahimi’s objections won’t matter. Neither will the criticisms of those in Washington who sensibly question Allawi’s past and probably present predilections. The democratic ethos in Iraq, fortified much more by the Iraqi Shiite clergy than the Coalition Provisional Authority, is still moving forward. It would be a good idea, however, lest Secretary Powell’s common sense start to fail, for the Bush administration to defy the elections experts in the U.S. government and the United Nations who think January 2005 is too soon for a “proper” contest and advance the date for the first elections. Only democracy will allow the Americans and the Iraqis to escape the violence that is the legacy of Saddam Hussein and the Sunni Arab dictators and kings who preceded him.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.